The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

by Jon E. Lewis

  Where the tax protestors have firmer ground under their feet is on the matter of subsequent revisions to the tax process. As one former IRS commissioner, Shirley Peterson, noted, “Eight decades of amendments … to (the) code have produced a virtually impenetrable maze … The rules are … mysterious to many government employees who are charged with administering and enforcing the law.”

  Even the IRS cannot understand the IRS. Legitimate questions can also be raised about the IRS’s behaviour and competence. In Unbridled Power, Shelley L. Davis, the IRS’s first and last historian, laid bare a secretive organization which compiled lists of “enemies” and routinely destroyed records – a federal offence – which might prove incriminating or embarrassing. Before a Senate Finance Committee hearing, she testified that crucial IRS records, pertaining to government, states and individuals, “have been destroyed. Gone. Shredded. Tossed. They no longer exist … No other agency of our government could get away with this … Our fear of suffering a personal attack from the IRS generally keeps most of us in check … This ensures that it can never be held accountable for its actions. How can you prove any wrongdoing when the evidence is already destroyed?”

  How indeed? Fortunately, a few whistle-blowers, such as Davis herself, have done the right thing and spoken out. Some of the IRS’s wrongdoing is staggering. At Nixon’s request, it launched investigations of his opponents for his purely political purposes and no other reason at all. One such “enemy” was the Fund for Investigative Journalism, which funded Seymour Hersh’s reporting on the My Lai massacre. In the words of Nixon’s aide John Dean, the idea was to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies”.

  Further Reading

  John A. Andrew III, The Power to Destroy, 2002

  Shelley L. Davis, Unbridled Power, 1998

  www.freedomclubusa.com/donald_duck_tax

  ISRAELI BUBBLEGUM

  In spring 1997, the Palestinian Authority reported on an Israeli plot fiendish in its machinations and consequences: to infiltrate into the West Bank and Gaza bubblegum laced with sex hormones to be sold at a discounted rate outside schools. The bubblegum aroused the sexual appetite of girls, but simultaneously sterilized them, suppressing Arab population growth. Worst of all, according to Palestinian Supply Minister Abdel Aziz Shaheen, it was capable of “completely destroying the genetic system of young boys”.

  According to Palestinian tests, the strawberry-flavoured gum was spiked with progesterone, one of the two hormones of femaleness. That Israel, an essentially Western society, should try to undermine Islamic morals with sex pills played on deep Palestinian fears.

  The Washington Post commissioned tests on allegedly contaminated bubblegum. These tests were done by Dan Gibson, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at Hebrew University and a member of the left-wing lobby group Peace Now (thus no Zionist). Using a mass spectrometer capable of detecting as little as a microgram of progesterone, he found no trace of the hormone in the gum.

  In fairness, a story of adulterated food was not entirely implausible. Shady Israeli merchants, working in collaboration with Palestinian profiteers, had shipped canned baby food to Gaza which turned out to be soy formula past its sell by date. But weighing against the Palestinian bubblegum claim – aside from the Washington Post’s spectrometer test – was its timing: Israel and Palestine were in the middle of a propaganda war, with both sides making things up.

  So, pop went the great Israeli bubblegum conspiracy. It blew up again in 2009 when Hamas charged Israeli intelligence operatives with distributing libido-increasing gum in the Gaza enclave. A Hamas police spokesman in the Gaza Strip, Islam Shahwan, announced: “The Israelis seek to destroy the Palestinians’ social infrastructure with these products and to hurt the young generation by distributing drugs and sex stimulants.”

  Numerous teenage boys reportedly asked, “Where can I buy some of that gum?”

  Further Reading

  Barton Gellman, “Pop! Went the Tale of the Bubblegum Spiked with Sex Hormones”, Washington Post, 28 July 1997

  JACK THE RIPPER

  Between August and November 1888, the Whitechapel district in the East End of London was the scene of five – possibly six – slayings by a serial killer, dubbed by the press “Jack the Ripper”. The murdered were all female prostitutes, and all – except for Elizabeth Stride – were mutilated.

  The first slaying, that of Polly Nicholls, took place on 31 August. Annie Chapman was murdered on 8 September. Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were both killed on 30 September and Mary Jane Kelly on 9 November. These are the “canonical five” Ripper victims, although some “Ripperologists” consider that Martha Tabram, fatally stabbed on 6 August 1888, should also be included on the butcher’s slate.

  The identity of the perpetrator was, and is, a mystery. It is widely assumed that he (maybe she) had some medical training, based on the scalpel-like weapon used and the mutilations of the corpses, which showed a knowledge of anatomy. More than one hundred individuals have at some stage been proposed as the Ripper, but the most sensational suspect remains Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence – the son of the Prince of Wales, third in line to the throne. Dr Thomas Stowell nominated Eddy as the Ripper in an article in The Criminologist in 1970, suggesting that Eddy’s syphilis drove him insane, thus homicidal. Clearly a homicidal duke with a habit of mutilation was not good PR for the Royal Family, so they quickly bundled Eddy off to a private mental hospital, from which he briefly escaped to murder Mary Kelly, before being re-incarcerated. According to Stowell, Eddy died in the asylum of syphilitic “softening of the brain”, and not of flu as the Palace claimed. The Duke of Clarence supposedly learned disembowelling techniques on hunting expeditions. The Prince Eddy accusation was substantially repeated by Frank Spiering in Prince Jack. Like Stowell, Spiering claims to have found the necessary proofs in the private papers of Sir William Withey Gull, the royal physician. Ripperologists, however, point out that royal court records show that Eddy was not in London on the dates of the murders.

  As cause, rather than perpetrator, Prince Eddy figures in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution by Stephen Knight, which posits a mass homicidal conspiracy instigated by the Royal Family to cover up Eddy’s secret marriage to a commoner named Alice Mary Crook. And not just any old commoner, but a Catholic one, thus violating the 1701 Act of Settlement. In brief, Knight has Prince Eddy slumming it down the East End accompanied by artist Walter Sickert, where he meets, beds and marries Alice Crook. When Grandmama – who happens to be Queen Victoria – hears about the marriage and its issue, a baby girl, she is not only scandalized but fearful that the news that a Catholic is in line to the throne will cause riots in the streets of Britain. To keep the kingdom safe, Victoria orders Lord Salisbury to deal with the matter; in turn he enlists help of Sir William Gull (yes, him again) and Salisbury/Gull have Eddy and Alice kidnapped from their love nest on Cleveland Street, with Eddy hospitalized under Gull’s care and Alice put in an asylum. Eddy dies from syphilis in 1892, and Alice dies insane in 1920. What about the Ripper murders? According to Knight, Eddy and Alice’s daughter was being nannied by one Mary Kelly when the love nest was raided. She then committed the child to the care of nuns, before returning to the East End and falling into drink and prostitution. At the behest of her friends, Mary Kelly began blackmailing the Royal Family – their royal money for her silence over the Eddy and Alice tryst. To make absolutely certain Mary and her chums – Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman and Liz Stride – kept their mouths shut, Gull and his coachman, John Netley, murdered them all, plus Catherine Eddowes, whom they mistook for Kelly.

  As a physician, Gull certainly had the knowledge to perform the spectacular dissection of Mary Kelly, who was skinned, her abdomen emptied, her womb placed at her feet. One of her hands was placed in the evacuated abdominal cavity. Her intestines were placed over her left shoulder. Her heart was missing, as was the foetus she was known to be carrying.

  Gull, who died fifteen months after
Kelly, escaped detection, Knight believes, because the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Robert Anderson, was a member of the conspiracy. What bound the principal conspirators, aside from their desire to carry out the royal will, was that they – Gull, Salisbury, Anderson – were all Freemasons. Knight discloses that the murders were actually re-enactments of the murder of Mason Hirem Abiff in Solomon’s Temple by Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum. The real evidence of the Masonic connection comes in the placing of the victims in specific locations, most dramatically that of Mitre Square, a “Mitre” and “Square” both being Masonic tools.

  Does Knight’s book live up to its subtitle, The Final Solution? Alas not. Knight’s principal source of information was Joseph Sickert, the artist’s grandson. Joseph Sickert later recanted some of his most sensational claims. William Gull was also six foot tall, much taller than the eyewitness accounts of the Ripper. He was also seventy years old at the time of the murders.

  Additionally, there is nothing to suggest that Gull (or Anderson) were Masons. It is also difficult to believe that the Crown would have resorted to serial killing to protect itself when invocation of the Royal Marriages Act would have set aside a marriage between Eddy and Annie because it was illegal, Eddy being underage and not having obtained the Queen’s consent. Lastly, almost all experts agree that the Ripper was insane. And Dr Gull does not fit the profile.

  Further Reading

  Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, 1976

  Donald Rumbelow, The Complete Jack the Ripper, 2004

  www.casebook.org

  MICHAEL JACKSON

  Was Wacko Jacko whacked? The singer had not finished moon-walking off the mortal coil on 25 June 2009, before the w.w.w. went w-w-wild with rumours that he had been murdered. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took pole position in the suspect stakes, the reasoning being that the King of Pop’s demise handily diverted media attention from his crackdown in Tehran to Bel Air. Ahmadinejad’s rivals in responsibility for the deed were a criminal syndicate based in Russia, China, or was it Langley (HQ of the CIA), who controlled Jackson through his addiction to anaesthetics and raked in the moolah? Worried that Jackson was seeking to escape their nefarious clutches and go public, the gang/CIA had him bumped.

  Theories that Jackson was murdered are rivalled only by the theories that Jackson is alive and well. Jacko is hanging out with Elvis south of the border, down Mexico way. The kings live! Why did Jackson fake his own death? Pressure of fame. Money. Or more precisely its lack. The hit-meister may have sold 61 million albums in the USA, but he was still in the red to the tune of $400 million. Aside from his habit of spending, spending, spending (the Neverland Ranch cost $14.6 million alone), his bank account had been sucked dry by lawsuits over his alleged child abuse. As conspiracists have it, by counterfeiting his death, Jacko could settle all his debts and still make money. Indeed, by demising, he would rekindle interest in his music, making it a very smart career move indeed. Death also had the advantage of being an inviolable excuse for cancelling his fifty-date comeback tour in the UK, which was shaping up to be Bad rather than a Thriller due his ill health. To take Jackson’s place on the mortuary slab, he and his accomplices (his family, chiefly) found a terminally ill double. To make sure nobody noticed the switch, the family therefore cancelled the announced lying in state at Neverland.

  However, some think M. J. Jackson died of natural causes years before, and his body was rushed into a makeshift grave at Neverland. The police – who were afterwards paid handsomely to keep their lips sealed – had no difficulty in identifying the corpse because it was wearing a single glove. An impersonator then took over the singing duties. When he outlived his usefulness he was offed, and it is his body that was found on 25 June 2009.

  Rewind to reality: Jackson died while in his bed at his rented mansion at 100 North Carolwood Drive in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles coroner’s office – which is considered expert on these things – carried out a post-mortem and expressed no doubts that the body was a) Michael Jackson and b) dead. At time of writing, Jackson’s physician, Conrad Murray, is on trial for involuntary manslaughter on the grounds that he had improperly supplied Jackson with the surgical anaesthetic propofol as a sedative. Jackson was reputedly addicted to the drug, which he called his “mother’s milk”. Jackson died of an acute overdose of propofol. Murray’s crime was not malicious, neither was it part of a conspiracy. He breached medical standards by supplying the drug as a sleep aid and failing to monitor his patient.

  This is it: Jackson’s death was an accident.

  Further Reading

  www.michaeljacksonsightings.com

  DR DAVID KELLY

  Those implicated in the 2003 demise of Dr David Kelly include the Iraqi secret service, the French secret service, and not least, Kelly himself. Whatever the truth about his death, he was as much a victim of the war in Iraq as any soldier or civilian killed on the battlefield.

  The confusion, briefings and counter-briefings that surrounded the days running up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 created a nervousness and state of tension which caused all parties involved to act in unpredictable ways. During this time the UK Government released two dossiers which set out evidence for its belief that Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a real threat to world security: the September 2002 document which stated that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that, crucially, these weapons could be deployed within forty-five minutes; and a second, in February 2003, which detailed secret arms networks. A month later the UK had deployed troops in Iraq to secure Hussein’s downfall in spite of vocal protests from the Government’s own MPs and many other groups.

  On 20 May 2003, BBC Radio’s flagship current affairs programme Today featured a report from its defence correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, in which he revealed that a senior source at the Ministry of Defence accused a member of the Downing Street press office (later identified as Alastair Campbell) of having “sexed up” the September dossier by inserting the information about the 45-minute deployment. The BBC’s Newsnight correspondent Susan Watts also reported that a “senior official” believed the intelligence services came under heavy political pressure to include the 45-minute claim in its dossier.

  The Government, enraged by the leak, demanded that Gilligan reveal his source, and weeks of accusation and counter-accusation began, with the BBC defending Gilligan and the anonymity of his source and the Government’s press machine attempting to discredit the story. Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s director of news, described the attacks as “an unprecedented level of pressure from Downing Street”. Both Gilligan and Campbell were asked to appear before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FAC) to explain their actions.

  The media frenzy must have worried Dr Kelly, who wrote to his line manager at the ministry admitting he had met Gilligan on 22 May and could have been one of the sources for his story. After another ten days of increasing pressure to reveal the identity of the source, the MoD then identified Kelly indirectly by pointedly refusing to deny he was involved when a list of possible sources was read out at a press conference, although Kelly himself was not informed his name was being released to the press.

  On 15 and 16 July Dr Kelly sat in front of the FAC facing allegations that it was he who had been the source of the Gilligan story. He appeared deeply uncomfortable at being the centre of so much public attention, and spoke so softly that air-conditioning fans had to be turned off so the committee members could hear what he was saying. Despite much probing, Kelly maintained that, although he had spoken to Gilligan, he had not been his primary source. Kelly said the controversial point about the 45-minute deployment claim being added by Alastair Campbell could not have come from him as he had no part in the actual compilation of the dossier, but had merely presented information for possible inclusion, and thus had not been party to the decisions by the Joint Intelligence Committee, who had produced the document.

  At th
e end of the two days the FAC had concluded that Kelly was “most unlikely” to be the source of the “sexed-up” claim. Kelly, too, had relaxed, and was laughing and joking with the committee members.

  The following day, 17 July, he left his home at 3.00 p.m., telling his wife he was going for his usual afternoon walk. He did not return. At 11.45 p.m. his family contacted the police and reported him missing. He was found at 9.20 the next morning by two search volunteers in woods on Harrowdown Hill, about a mile and a half (2.5 km) from his home. The police did not confirm the body as his until 19 July, and then stated that they believed he had committed suicide by taking the powerful painkiller co-proxamol and then cutting his left wrist. A day later, after talking to his family, the BBC issued a statement naming Dr Kelly as the source of both Gilligan’s and Watts’s reports.

  In the light of the previous train of events and unusual vigour with which the Government had pursued Andrew Gilligan and his source, it seems understandable that an independent inquiry into the whole affair was announced as the best way of uncovering the truth surrounding Kelly’s death and the lingering accusation that Downing Street had tampered with intelligence reports. Lord Hutton was appointed to head the inquiry, and his inquiry heard several months’ worth of evidence from experts, Kelly’s friends and family, and members of the Cabinet, including Tony Blair. Five months later, after much hype and speculation, Hutton concluded that the Government had behaved properly, that the BBC should be heavily criticized for its actions, and that Kelly’s death had been by his own hand.

  There, it was presumably hoped, is where the whole unfortunate episode would end, but there were some who pointed to inconsistencies in the official version of events. Many people who had been close to Kelly, professionally and personally, did not believe the suicide story, and others believed his death bore all the hallmarks of a planned assassination.